Healed to serve
Isaiah 40: 21-31 Mark 1: 29-39 I want you to imagine a pendulum. Swinging, slowly, to & fro. Not so I can lull you to sleep, I hope, but to help us to explore our readings this morning and think about what they mean for us. Whenever people think about God, they tend to set up ideas which seem to be opposite, and the pendulum starts to swing. Surely God is high above everything we know, the maker of all things, the creator of everything from atoms to planets. God is vast, immense, unknowable. One end of the pendulum has people describing God in this lofty, magnificent, splendid way. Isaiah paints a picture of a God who sits so far from us that we look like grasshoppers in his sight “great in strength, mighty in power”. But then the gospels paint a picture of Jesus who is ‘God with us’ – down to earth, living a human life, concerned for Simon’s mother-in-law. The pendulum swings the other way as we see God right here with us, in Jesus. The wonder is that God is a...